Why expectations matter

Now, in one way, it is always possible just to ignore the whole thing. Attitudes, expectations, stereotypes, different rules, biases – it’s all so woolly, and subjective, and impossible to demonstrate beyond a reasonable doubt, so the hell with it; let’s just get on with it and sexism will wither away on its own.

But the trouble with that is, all those things have effects in the real world, that are not a bit woolly and subjective. If women are seen as

just there for sex

either there for sex or totally superfluous and in the way

second best

stupid and inept but tolerable to have around because of sex

an afterthought

peripheral

the exception to the rule

then they are less likely to be hired, promoted, commissioned, published, broadcast, cast in movies, invited to speak at conferences.

And behold – in the world we live in, that is indeed how things are. Maybe some of that or a lot of that is because women just don’t want to be hired or promoted or the rest of it, but maybe some of it or a lot of it is because of attitudes, expectations, stereotypes, different rules, biases.

Women can’t really afford to shrug off attitudes and expectations, unless we’re content to settle for smaller more limited opportunities and lives than men have.

48 Responses to “Why expectations matter”

I agree with you. Expectations, attitudes, privileges, and hidden voices and experiences of every person matters. It’s always a problem if some of them cannot be talked about.

There is plenty of outstanding writing on voice and privilege. bell hooks comes to mind, where I’ll take just a few quotes for consideration, but she has lots more to say on it:

On the goal: Recognizing difference without linking it to privilege:

“If we want a beloved community, we must stand for justice, have recognition for difference without attaching difference to privilege”

On the function of privilege and advancing:

“Privilege is not in and of itself bad; what matters is what we do with privilege. I want to live in a world where all women have access to education, and all women can earn PhD’s, if they so desire. Privilege does not have to be negative, but we have to share our resources and take direction about how to use our privilege in ways that empower those who lack it.”

On the power of critical thinking:

“Thinking critically is at the heart of anybody transforming their life and I really believe that a person who thinks critically, who, you know, may be extraordinarily disadvantaged, materially, can find ways to transform their lives, that can be deeply and profoundly meaningful in the same way that someone who maybe incredibly privileged materially and in crisis in their life may remain perpetually unable to resolve their life in any meaningful way if they don’t think critically.”

I think all of these are great points of discussion, a discussion that I haven’t really seen too much on those very terms. I.e. I think we can and should reflect on privilege, and on empowerment.

Frankly I think there are lots of good thought that have already been articulated that have not made it into our discourse about equality, feminism, privilege and how it all plays out in the little niche that is the atheist community.

Just trying to engage here. Because my wife is an attorney, I tend to have a lot of attorney friends, male and female. The thing is that some of them *do* “shrug off” stuff like Elevatorgate (if that’s what you are talking about). Because they bust their asses to make $$$ and don’t have time for fainting couch drama. Because they don’t see themselves as the weaker sex. Because they get yelled at like everyone else at work and keep it together. It’s possible to think that way *and* think RW was justified in briefly scolding the guy for being boorish. End of story? Nope. Rape. Second class citizens. Gender traitors. Sexual liminality. Interesting things but god almighty.

Hitch,

To me, this has very little at this point to do with “critical thinking”.

And, lastly, it’s a bear of a thing to discuss over the internet and I certainly overreact and miss nuances and jump on people too quickly. I don’t think anyone would be asked to die in a fire in person.

Because they bust their asses to make $$$ and don’t have time for fainting couch drama. Because they don’t see themselves as the weaker sex. Because they get yelled at like everyone else at work and keep it together.

May I ask you a question? Why is this always said as if they should be points in person x’s column and counted against person y?

Because they bust their asses to make $$$ and don’t have time for fainting couch drama. Because they don’t see themselves as the weaker sex. Because they get yelled at like everyone else at work and keep it together. It’s possible to think that way *and* think RW was justified in briefly scolding the guy for being boorish. End of story? Nope. Rape. Second class citizens. Gender traitors. Sexual liminality. Interesting things but god almighty.

I do hope, Adam, that you realize that you’re engaging in exactly what OB is criticizing in her post, though.

“My wife is one of them thar enlightened women, not like those weak, pathetic, sad, wilting, over-dramatic, hysterical, piteous specimens of so-called feminity who just want to be cuddled and would probably benefit from a good fucking.”

“Women can’t really afford to shrug off attitudes and expectations, unless we’re content to settle for smaller more limited opportunities and lives than men have.”

But surely you don’t mean that it’s an either/or proposition, Ophelia. I can and do actually “shrug” these off (due to privilege, choosing my battles, etc.) while recognizing the cost and still expect better from my society. Consider how most of us who are not activists do just that, day in and day out. We grant and concede so much by virtue of the way we live in the US, for example.

So, of course, in principle we should expect equality, respect, all of what you call for here (directly and indirectly), but surely in practice we are often forced to settle for less (even in privileged groups), and choose to settle, again and again, while things improve and change and are once more set back for women, both here and abroad. It is the way things are, but acknowledging that with either a real or a mental shrug is not synonymous with being content is it? Or am I misundrestanding what you mean by “content”?

I wonder how much this brou-ha-ha is a consequence of ‘two countries confused by a common language’. Like Dawkins, I am British (I even studied at the same university), and my reaction to ‘lift man’ was a very Brit, ‘oh dear, terrible manners, what do you expect’. I noticed other Brits reacting similarly on a few threads here and there. This then forced me to think about a few things, and ask some questions.

1. If someone propositioned me in this way in England, would I be irritated? The answer is ‘no’. If someone did so in the US, the answer is ‘yes’. I would still react the same way (the diffident Brit brush off). I wonder if this is because I have travelled to the US in the main for work (for conferences, too), while I live and work in the UK and am familiar with my own country.

2. Do I accept the use of the word ‘privilege’ as it has been used by many people, including feminists? The answer is no, I don’t. Before coming to this conclusion, I had to do some reading in order to get at its conceptual basis. I am a lawyer; ‘privilege’ means something very different in my line of work. I learned that it has its origins in what is known as ‘standpoint epistemology’, the core of which seems to be an argument that it is difficult (impossible?) for people to think outside their background, and for other people (their interlocutors) to escape the effect of that narrowed epistemological scope in debates, on-line or elsewhere. Some standpoint epistemologists go further, arguing that entire groups can have particular perspectives (‘all women’, ‘all men’ etc).

I don’t think I accept this argument. If it were true, it would make empathy (and therefore altruism) very difficult, and would also make core parts of my profession impossible. Trying to do law without ‘objective tests’ and ‘reasonableness’ measures (all of which depend on thinking oneself into another person’s position) would be impossible. Since law is possible, and works well in many places (including Britain and the US), then the empirical evidence is against standpoint epistemology. [As an aside, if it were true, novel-writing would also become difficult, but that is by the by].

3. Does one have to be a liberal [US definition] and a feminist to be a skeptic and atheist? No, one does not. In Britain I am a liberal, which means I vote Conservative. In the US, I think this makes me a Classical Liberal, but I would be voting Democrat (the Republican Party is full of God-botherers, which I cannot abide). Since so many of the feminist arguments I saw (at least on this issue) were based on a weak foundation (the privilege argument), I do not think I am a feminist either. At least not that sort of feminist. But I do strongly support equality of opportunity, abortion rights, law reform in areas where women are still discriminated against (the law of provocation in some jurisdictions), action on domestic violence (mainly ensuring that it is taken seriously). So I think that means I do get to call myself a feminist.

4. Does being a skeptic and an atheist mean defending women’s rights? Yes, I think it does. It also means recognising that there are differences of degree. Women in much of the developing world have far fewer rights than Western women. Often these rights are denied for religious reasons, particularly in Islam, but sometimes also in Christianity (the latter link seems more common in the US than in the UK). In the UK, it is Conservatives who are up front about the misogyny in Islam. The Labour Party is often very softly-softly in its approach to Islam, with the honourable exception of former Home Secretary Jack Straw.

I do not want to be part of a skeptical and atheistic ‘movement’ (how I hate that word) that excludes Conservatives (especially the British sort, we are mostly quite nice). There are serious empirical arguments to be made against many liberal [US definition] positions, especially in economics; some aspects of feminism are pretty woolly, too. The blithe assumption that everyone must line up and espouse a particular politics really grates on me. I would much rather be persuaded by evidence.

I think that’s what’s grating so many people (definitely one of the things that’s getting to me.) The ‘that’s just how it is’ attitude. (if this isn’t what you were going for please ignore this) Doubly so because we seem to be in agreement this was inappropriate and that, in essence, you’re conceding that men feel entitled to proposition women wherever whenever regardless of how appropriate it might be. It’s just not something you think men can change or that it should be discouraged or something else to the effect of ‘so what? let them be.’

I’m suffering from pretty serious “sexism fatigue” right now, and I think I’d like to walk away from it for a few days/years and recharge my batteries… which is part of the problem, since women can’t decide to just ignore it and hope it goes away. Well, not successfully.

I’m very impressed with Hitch’s post – those are some excellent quotes from bel hooks, and not ones I’d encountered before. Thank you for bringing those to my attention. I think your takeawar is spot on: “we can and should reflect on privilege, and on empowerment.”

I suppose I feel that it is extremely difficult to organize and conduct discussions around privilege which enable people engage critically with their own privilege or lack thereof without it feeling like someone is under attack for having privilege, and risking them shutting down or otherwise stalling the process, or making those who are disempowered feel like they have to be representative of whatever group with which they are associated.

Developing discursive mechanisms which make a space safe enough for all involved to reflect on privilege and empowerment without making it so safe that no uncomfortable truths can be raised is a real pedagogical challenge. I see personal narratives of disempowerment as being central to this goal, which is why I am so open with my own struggles with my sexuality – I think it helps that people have actual examples of disempowerment and lack of privilege to consider, examples they can put themselves into and feel. But I don’t think this is enough of a process on its own – it’s only the start of a journey of opening up assumptions to critique and analysis which I think can often be quite painful.

I don’t think that sexism will simply “wither away”, more’s the pity. I think that it is something that has to be confronted and worked on time and time again. I think that the fact that we men have evolved to respond to visual clues (to a woman’s appearance, how she moves and speaks and so on), coupled with the natural strength of the instinctual urge towards propagating our species, means that there will always be some tendency for men to respond to a woman physically without regard for the person who is there, and even with a tendency to discount clues about this actual person, or either to seek a sexual encounter despite clear warnings against, or to imagine invitations which aren’t actually being given.

There is also the problem that one’s eagerness for sex with someone can be strong enough to cause great disappointment if it is frustrated, and this can easily combine with egotism, as when a man feels somehow insulted or demeaned by a rejection. It can easily happen that a man can imagine that he has been encouraged, and will then feel badly treated when the woman he fancies says “no”. Similarly, it can easily happen that a woman alone with a man who makes a sexual approach in some isolated or restricted space, like an elevator, may experience real fear because even saying “no” may cause such resentment in the man as to lead to an assault. From her point of view, confronted with this sudden demand, there may be no right answer. For there is a continuum ranging from casual lack of consideration to extreme rage; it derives from seeing a woman as a desirable object and not as a person (including forgetting, even if only momentarily, that she is a person); this is the point which Richard Dawkins has unfortunately missed (not, I think, because he is privileged and bigoted, but simply because he hasn’t thought about it before; his knee-jerk response is revealing, but only because, if such a fundamentally decent man can be sexist, what does that say about us men in general?).

I think that this must also be linked with other aspects of sexism. A woman showing independence of mind is a woman who is likely to reject one sexually. She is someone who will not “submit” as a matter of course to her male “superior”, someone who cannot simply be “given” in marriage (“Who giveth this woman to be married to this man?”). A woman one sees in the street may be someone towards whom one feels some attraction, or even only because she is a woman one might feel the mere association of sex, and one might react with resentment that she is walking around so freely and “making” one feel momentarily uncomfortable. I think that this is a very obvious issue in Islam, for example, where it is the woman who is blamed for being “seductive”, not the man who realises and accepts that his responses are determined by nature, and where the chief burden of “submission” is laid upon women.

The only answer is, a greater readiness to be aware of one’s own feelings, a greater acceptance of responsibility for one’s feelings instead of loading them onto the other person, and a more honest effort to see clearly. It makes us truly human to do that, so it’s really an opportunity. But it is something that must be worked on all the time. Instincts and egotism are not just going to go away.

I’m suffering from pretty serious “sexism fatigue” right now, and I think I’d like to walk away from it for a few days/years and recharge my batteries… which is part of the problem, since women can’t decide to just ignore it and hope it goes away. Well, not successfully.

This. Thank you. I’ve skimmed the comments on this thread so far and I’m not up to it. I’m buoyed by the people who post to say they didn’t understand and now, after participating in the debates, they do, or in whom I’ve seen change even if they don’t point to it, or just some of you guys taking it on here and elsewhere. But when you feel like you’ve just rowed across an ocean only to find, over the first rise, yet another immense sea of sexist stupidity and entitlement, setting out again isn’t easy.

How can this be true of men and not women? We’re separate sexes, not species. Do people think that sexual selection has somehow driven sexual responses to be that different? The research I’m familiar with (the actual studies, not the evo psych interpretations) shows that women respond to men’s visual clues, too. We are a social and visual species.

Well, I think you are right, MyaR. I think that there is a matter of degree. It seems to me that women spend more time weighing up whether a prospective male partner is likely to be a stable partner, reliable, able to provide for all those times when she is just producing more kids, breast-feeding them, teaching them to walk and talk etc. Men are definitely more turned on by a woman’s looks, less likely to think of the long term. These are conflicting survival options, and we need to take them into account.

MJ said my wife thinks something along the lines that these shrinking violet bloggers need a good fucking.

No she(?) didn’t. Your first accusation of implying was closer to the truth but still wrong. Much closer to the truth would be to say she accused you of saying it. Going back to her comment

“My wife is one of them thar enlightened women, not like those weak, pathetic, sad, wilting, over-dramatic, hysterical, piteous specimens of so-called feminity who just want to be cuddled and would probably benefit from a good fucking.”

Obviously this is a reiteration of an argument that’s frustrated MJ (and I hope I’m not being to presumptuous assuming this is what you were going for. If not please correct me) because while pretending to dismiss the concerns of feminists it just validates their point. What you posted was very similar to to it (minus the needing a good fucking)so she gave the inflammatory version as both a rhetorical trick and to drive home how silly the argument is.

I don’t think I accept this argument. If it were true, it would make empathy (and therefore altruism) very difficult, and would also make core parts of my profession impossible. Trying to do law without ‘objective tests’ and ‘reasonableness’ measures (all of which depend on thinking oneself into another person’s position) would be impossible. Since law is possible, and works well in many places (including Britain and the US), then the empirical evidence is against standpoint epistemology. [As an aside, if it were true, novel-writing would also become difficult, but that is by the by].

Empathy and altruism are difficult! The second part of your argument seems absurdly oversimplified. Somehow if empathy is difficult because of privilege or “standpoint epistemology” lawyering is impossible? Unless ‘objective tests’ means something entirely different in the context of law than it does in science how does it require empathy? What emperical evidence have you presented here? It looks like your spinning on either/or axioms.

I do not want to be part of a skeptical and atheistic ‘movement’ (how I hate that word) that excludes Conservatives

Over the course of this debate, I’ve seen Ophelia extend the Gnu approach to issues of gender equality and received quite a push-back from other Gnu Atheists. Is it so hard to replace religious privilege and behavior with male privilege and behavior and atheism with feminism and gender equality? Maybe everyone has a cultural blind-spot; for some skeptics it is religion, others CAM or libertarianism and for others it is gender equality.

It might be a useful exercise for everyone to try and find (or admit) theirs.

Tragedy and comedy have a common foundation: the gap between expectation and outcome. A skilful dramatist can turn a film or play around on this nickel in an instant: from serious drama to farce and back again. (I could elaborate.)

Our lives are partly made from a series of somewhat and apparently free choices, but those choices in turn take place within the encircling razor wire of genetics. (What’s on the menu in the prison mess-hall tonight?) There are fairly well-known neo-Darwinist explanations for female animals tendency to to be rather particular on the question of which male of their species becomes the father of their offspring, and for the males to be somewhat less so in their choosing. I am sure that Richard Dawkins, who figures in a somewhat bizarre way in previous threads on this subject in N&C, would be aware of these reasons.

Throw in as well the concern generally shown by individuals to move in an upwards direction as far as they can in dominance hierarchies (again, a neo-Darwinist explanation is readily available), and we have the basis for an understanding of much human behaviour, and consequent legalities.

A common theme in male folklore (human, that is) is that women are very hard, if not impossible to understand. What is often meant here is that the choices they make and the expectations they have are often hard for us males to understand (read accept). ‘Whatever I do, it’s never right’; ‘You can’t win’; etc. My own father said to me once “always remember that man proposes, but woman disposes, and that makes it a woman’s world”. He was right up to a point. The male dominance in the most sexist societies on Earth (ie in the Islamic world) is based on a need to constantly remind the one sex of the other’s power, and to suggest a thousand times a day to the women that they are inferior and rightly powerless, to the point where they finish up wanting to wear their prison garb. In other words, there is there a constant uphill battle against the universal tendency for entropy gain. The commonest choice those women make is to go along with that, and structure their lives around it.

Men and women’s expectations, in lifts, hotel rooms and elsewhere, differ. Also outcomes: tragic for some, farcical for others.

Yet great truths remain in the proverbial wisdom of humanity, and the hand that rocks the cradle rules the world. Women will accept social inferiority only as long as it suits them to do so.

As Joanna Russ said in one of her famous passages, being a feminist is no fun. If anyone thinks that we women gleefully will do “feminist stuff” if we could be doing just about anything else, from figuring out the equations of the Theory of Everything to orchestrating the perfect takeover, they’re sadly mistaken. Also, you know people are running out of excuses when we get:

1. arguments of the type “my wife/mistress/concubine is a feminist and she agrees with me,”

2. evo-psycho pseudoscience of the “women are from Venus, men are from Mars” kind,

3. shrugs of “Dawkins responded as a typical Brit” — which may squeak by for his first comment, but not the two that followed it (let alone that this evaluation stereotypes him and his compatriots far worse than what Watson called him).

Dawkins knows exactly what he did. This was no knee-jerk reaction; it was a very standard silencing technique and he used it to the limits of its power.

There are fairly well-known neo-Darwinist explanations for female animals tendency to to be rather particular on the question of which male of their species becomes the father of their offspring, and for the males to be somewhat less so in their choosing. I am sure that Richard Dawkins, who figures in a somewhat bizarre way in previous threads on this subject in N&C, would be aware of these reasons.

That’s certainly not true for chimps where males dominate females exclusively. In Bonobos, females dominate males and, like humans, both males and females are highly sexual and can distinguish between reproduction and sex. In other words, I think drawing conclusions from fixed or evolved behavior is rather difficult.

Ok, so that’s not an “argument”. Fine. I’ll stick to me. it’s a tempest in a teapot. EG and RD were rude. It had nothing to do with women getting better jobs or sexual assault. I can think that and still wish no harm ever befall a woman and wish things improve for women.

I’m sure if I talked about the often rampant sexism that my wife runs into in the legal world, then she would have been an excellent witness.

May I suggest that rather then people being upset because she’s a woman and not a feminist, they’re upset because you’re being interpreted as saying that this puts your wife above (is that the right word?) above women who do?

I can think that and still wish no harm ever befall a woman and wish things improve for women.

You can also think all that and still have been influenced by sexist thinking. Even holding a couple.

I’ll try this again, having had my comment disappear. (Nothing to do with this site; I am utterly technically incompetent).

The standard objective test is ‘the reasonable person, in the position of the plaintiff/pursuer’. It asks jurors, judges and others to assess the facts before them and imagine themselves in the plaintiff’s position. It is done, taking those facts into account, on a daily basis by jurors in common law jurisdictions (England, USA), lay judges in civil [Roman] law jurisdictions (France, Japan) and both in mixed jurisdictions (Scotland, Quebec), with a high degree of success. If the ability to engage in that behaviour did not exist relatively commonly, the legal systems enumerated would not function. It is not the same as the objective test in science (about which I am not qualified to comment in any detail).

The fact that these legal systems function (and well) is evidence that arguments about privilege (‘people cannot gain imaginative entry to other people’s experiences due to their background’) are weak. This apart, there is the strong link between development of the objective test and the presumption of innocence. One of the reasons Socrates’ Apologia reads so oddly to people in the US or Britain or Japan is because he lived in a society that assayed the presumption of guilt (‘where there’s smoke, there’s fire’), not the presumption of innocence (‘imagine if you were the suspect’ – Cicero). Three societies developed both the objective test and the presumption of innocence in a recognisable modern form: pagan Rome, medieval England, medieval Japan. In all three, the test asked individuals to put themselves in another person’s shoes. Two of those civilisations (Rome, England) gave us moderns the only two legal systems that work (Commodore Perry put the kybosh on the Japanese contribution, which is rather unfortunate. Japan is a Roman law country now). Both common law and Roman law depend on the objective test and its corollary, the presumption of innocence.

Then, of course, there is the evidence of literature. If privilege existed as enumerated in the various threads I’ve read on this issue, there would be no Austen, no Eliot, no Nabakov and no Tolstoy. Among others. Writers–even more than jurors or lay judges–gain imaginative entry to all sorts of places. I am not a scientist, but as mentioned, there is also the point that rather doctrinaire arguments about privilege would seem to exclude the operation of both empathy and altruism, and without altruism, I understand we hominids would be rather doomed (on which, see Dawkins, R).

Finally, on the ‘Brit’ reaction: cultures are different. The US is no sort of cultural universal. We misunderstand each other (right down to Obama gifting Gordon Brown a set of DVDs he couldn’t even watch, thanks to market segmentation).

Well, true, in the past 48 hours it has become a miniature blog cottage industry, complete with all the armchair psychoanalysis and remedial sociology that you would expect from people on the internet.

But the issue for me isn’t really that Dawkins was rude (as if he belched in public or the like). It was that he posted something that was not rationally appropriate in the context of the conversation. It was an absurd non-sequitur that was seemingly designed to derail the conversation, not contribute to it. And he seemingly asserted it in order to give a lecture that nobody asked for, about something that none in that audience needed his advice on.

So those are logical and pragmatic problems, not (just) rudeness.

It had nothing to do with women getting better jobs or sexual assault.

Here’s the problem. By interpreting “zero bad” as meaning “not politically bad” or “legally bad”, you (and Dawkins) are effectively insisting that we should be talking about violence instead of norms that are offensive. That’s not appropriate to the conversation. Watson was hardly saying anything like “sue this guy and send him to Gitmo”, after all.

And as a result, Dawkins’ comments all seems a little bit weird for the present generation, well-represented at Pharyngula. We (well, not me, but many people my age) are nowhere near as bashful as Dawkins when it comes to talking about romantic norms.

Just delete my shit. This is just nasty. I won’t let the door hit my ass on the way out or whatever you want to say. It’s not worth it and other people like Blackford have said things more intelligently. Not “woe is me” but I should just take a step back before I post again.

“And behold – in the world we live in, that is indeed how things are. Maybe some of that or a lot of that is because women just don’t want to be hired or promoted or the rest of it, but maybe some of it or a lot of it is because of attitudes, expectations, stereotypes, different rules, biases.

Women can’t really afford to shrug off attitudes and expectations, unless we’re content to settle for smaller more limited opportunities and lives than men have.”

I think this is related to the examples of people trying to generalize to all women (or all members of any one group) based on their own experience or the experience of someone they know. The idea that we shouldn’t generalize goes both ways; women who have faced discrimination shouldn’t assume that other women made different decisions than they did due to discrimination (rather than their own preferences), but women who’ve been fortunate and haven’t faced as many discriminatory situations can’t just assume that others have been just as fortunate or that feminism is no longer needed. The discriminatory attitudes and beliefs that some people might think are in the past can still affect people’s lives today, depending on the beliefs of their family, community, etc. So, for instance, even though there are laws against discriminating in employment and education, there are still families that discourage their daughters from getting an education.

My understanding is that chimps are pretty promiscuous, and are into group sex in a big way, probably to assist social cohesion, as male-on male violence is bad for such. The frequency (lierally in some cases the number of times a day) a given male has sex with an accomodating female will thus be a factor in his prospects of genetic transmission. Hence also the enormous testes of the males. Chimp life is one long orgy.

In Bonobos, females dominate males and, like humans, both males and females are highly sexual and can distinguish between reproduction and sex.

I think that this thread illustrates the point I made above @ #25 that however highly sexual humans are, they are so in different ways. Which sex is more prone to proposition the other at 4:00 AM? As for the distinguishing between reproduction and sex, you have me intrigued. What does that mean, and how is it established?

I wonder how much this brou-ha-ha is a consequence of ‘two countries confused by a common language’.

If I hear one more version of the “oh, those crazy Americans!” arguments, I might just explode. On Pharyngula, an international contingent that included at least one Brit were agreeing with Watson and PZ; I myself am German and Polish and also agree with them. This is not something one can just dismiss because Americans are stupid/crazy/whatever

If it were true, it would make empathy (and therefore altruism) very difficult, and would also make core parts of my profession impossible. Trying to do law without ‘objective tests’ and ‘reasonableness’ measures (all of which depend on thinking oneself into another person’s position) would be impossible. Since law is possible, and works well in many places (including Britain and the US), then the empirical evidence is against standpoint epistemology. [As an aside, if it were true, novel-writing would also become difficult, but that is by the by].

Empathy IS difficult; it’s a well-known phenomenon that the demographics of juries influence the outcomes of a trial, which is why in many cases that involve non-whites, non-men, non-straights etc., some of the fiercest battles are over who should or shouldn’t be included in the jury, to skew the composition in one’s own favor; the law “works well” for whom, compared to what? you do know that legal discrimination is rampant, right? And lastly, it’s a very well known phenomenon that writers higher in the social hierarchy often are not able to write realistic characters who are members of groups lower in the hierarchy (men writing female characters, whites writing non-white characters, Westerners writing non-western characters (though, Europeans and Americans in Manga/Anime are just as hilariously badly stereotypical), straights writing gay characters, etc ad nauseam.), which is why the rare writer who can actually portray a diversity of authentic characters is often praised to high heaven for that ability.

I do not want to be part of a skeptical and atheistic ‘movement’ (how I hate that word) that excludes Conservatives (especially the British sort, we are mostly quite nice).

I beg to differ. Of the small sample of British Conservatives I had the displeasure to encounter, a significant chunk called me things like “worthless thrash” or told me I needed a good fucking to loosen up (followed by rape jokes), or said that the homelessness problem would solve itself if the homeless froze to death in the streets. I’m not impressed.

The fact that these legal systems function (and well) is evidence that arguments about privilege (‘people cannot gain imaginative entry to other people’s experiences due to their background’) are weak.

for what definition of “function”? discrimination in law is rampant, precisely because people find it difficult to gain imaginative entry into the experiences of people with completely different backgrounds than themselves. shit, there is a slow-moving but massive scandal rolling out in the US (especially Texas) about the mindblowingly large number of men (often minorities) who have been wrongfully sentenced to death and have been exonerated by DNA evidence.

If privilege existed as enumerated in the various threads I’ve read on this issue, there would be no Austen, no Eliot, no Nabakov and no Tolstoy.

For one, that something is difficult doesn’t mean it it impossible; two, using the exception to disprove the rule is kind of silly, don’t you think? by that logic, I could say that hearing loss doesn’t impair the ability to create music because Beethoven exists; and three, most people don’t write about characters completely different from what they may have known themselves., but rather twist the known to create an unknown. Even among great writers it is the exception that someone can pull off a realistic character of completely different background that would be believable to a person of that background.

there is also the point that rather doctrinaire arguments about privilege would seem to exclude the operation of both empathy and altruism, and without altruism, I understand we hominids would be rather doomed

again: difficult is not synonymous with impossible. Besides, what makes you think we evolved the ability to empathize with humans completely unlike ourselves? We’ve lived in very small, homogeneous groups for most of our evolutionary history, and have only very recently begun to forcibly overcome our ingrained tribalisms.

Of the small sample of British Conservatives I had the displeasure to encounter, a significant chunk called me things like “worthless thrash” or told me I needed a good fucking to loosen up (followed by rape jokes), or said that the homelessness problem would solve itself if the homeless froze to death in the streets. I’m not impressed.

difficult is not synonymous with impossible. Besides, what makes you think we evolved the ability to empathize with humans completely unlike ourselves? We’ve lived in very small, homogeneous groups for most of our evolutionary history, and have only very recently begun to forcibly overcome our ingrained tribalisms.

Yes, difficult is not impossible, but I think that we have a very long way to go. As you suggest, we’ve hardly started. I cannot see how women will become free of male dominance till they are in a much stronger position, more able to dictate their own terms. The most serious obstacles in their way are all those religions and traditions and customs and habits of thought that reinforce instinct-based male assumptions and hegemony. As the last few days have shown, we see them working all the time, even where we least expect it. Rebecca Watson was entirely right to speak out, and we must work to encourage all women to do so. If new atheism doesn’t involve a complete overhaul of all our ideas of what it means to be human we are wasting our time.

2. evo-psycho pseudoscience of the “women are from Venus, men are from Mars” kind,

…

Dawkins knows exactly what he did. This was no knee-jerk reaction; it was a very standard silencing technique and he used it to the limits of its power.

I assume from the expression “knee-jerk reaction” that you are responding to my comment at #12. Well, if you are, I think you greatly exaggerate Dawkins’s “power”. Indeed, he has no power, unless you give it to him, and that’s your choice. If you insist on seeing him as an “authority” on everything on which he expresses an opinion and not as simply a person with a point of view that’s your business, but I think that it is a bad way to treat someone merely because you think he is wrong. I personally feel that I owe a great deal to Dawkins, and to a very few others others who, like him, have shown that it is possible for so many of us to speak out and be heard. If he really doesn’t “get” something important, then that is a learning opportunity for him. The playing field is level, as he would be the first to agree. I suspect that there is a great deal of heat and far too little concern for light in your remarks.

I really don’t know if your second point is also directed at my comment, but if it is, you have badly misunderstood what I am saying, and the comparison with tosh like the Mars-and-Venus stuff would then be absurd. If I am right about where your comment is going, either you do not realise, or you choose somehow to explain away, the terrible nature of our human predicament. I am not talking about “excuses”, I am talking about very serious problems that we have to address. I believe that our instincts play a profound part in how we behave, and underlie and are in turn reinforced by the traditional ways of living and understanding that we as social animals have evolved, ways which include religion, tribalism and the male possession of females. Therefore, an essential part of ensuring anything even approaching justice is our becoming aware of our instincts and how they form our behaviour (including our mental stories about what we “really” want and what we are “really” doing), and find ways to deal with their implications for how we relate to one another. Unless this is understood, there is no point in our even attempting to improve ourselves. We are animals. Any other view seems to me to be an avoidance of responsibility.

Perhaps this requires a little expansion. It is a fact that some societies traditionally treat all women as possessions, usually possessions of the pater familias or of the eldest male in the household. The “household” stuff is part of the business of demarking territory and making clear who can mate with whom and on what (male) terms. The instinctual basis of this is clear in the way in which men seek to possess women, belittle women in case they should be clever enough to rival or challenge the dominant male, exchange women to secure social advantage, attempt to circumscribe a woman’s behaviour, and kill women who don’t conform. The elevator incident is an example of this possessiveness, where a male presumes to discount everything that a prominent female has said and attempts to mate with her and thus (because of her social prominence) enhance his own social prestige, if only in his own eyes (alright, I’m guessing here, but why else should he ignore everything she had said? It’s at least clear that we’re not talking about a man who actually loves someone).

This habit of regarding women as possessions is found implicitly in our own society as well. We men may have reached the stage where we tend, by and large, to suppose that women are human and have rights and so on, but there is still a very strong tendency to regard women as weaker, less intelligent, more irrational, more emotional, more in need of protection, more determined by their biology, and a readiness to assume that we males are doing them a favour by just being there. I believe that this is part of the same mindset. Women are “inferior” = women are to be possessed, traded, used; and therefore: women should make allowances — a man has his needs, and a woman should accept them and shut up; how dare a woman say “no” to me? how dare a woman change her mind about marrying someone? (a young female very dear to me has experienced both of these, and I have heard similar complaints from several of my students). In all of this there is not the slightest consideration for a woman as a person in her own right, and with her own needs.